🔗 Share this article

Guests to the renowned gallery are familiar to surprising experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, slid down helter skelters, and seen AI-powered jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nasal cavities of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a labyrinthine structure based on the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can wander around or unwind on skins, listening on earphones to Sámi elders telling narratives and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It may appear whimsical, but the installation pays tribute to a little-known scientific wonder: experts have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the animal to endure in extreme Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "produces a perception of smallness that you as a person are not dominant over nature." She is a former reporter, young adult author, and rights advocate, who is from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that fosters the potential to alter your perspective or trigger some humbleness," she adds.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The winding design is part of a features in Sara's immersive commission honoring the culture, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They've experienced discrimination, integration policies, and repression of their tongue by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the work also draws attention to the community's issues relating to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Meaning in Components

Along the extended entrance slope, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot structure of pelts entangled by utility lines. It can be read as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this section of the artwork, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein thick sheets of ice appear as changing weather melt and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary winter food, moss. Goavvi is a result of global heating, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than globally.

Previously, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and joined Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they transported carts of supplementary feed on to the barren frozen landscape to distribute manually. The herd surrounded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain for mossy morsels. This expensive and demanding process is having a significant influence on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. But the other option is starvation. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others submerging after falling into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the installation is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

This artwork also emphasizes the stark contrast between the western view of electricity as a resource to be harnessed for gain and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an inherent essence in creatures, people, and nature. This venue's history as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be standard bearers for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their legal protections, livelihoods, and culture are threatened. "It's hard being such a small minority to stand your ground when the reasons are grounded in environmental protection," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the discourse of sustainability, but yet it's just striving to find alternative ways to continue practices of expenditure."

Individual Struggles

She and her kin have themselves disagreed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent regulations on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's sibling embarked on a set of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, supposedly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara produced a extended set of creations called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal screen of 400 cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it hangs in the lobby.

Art as Advocacy

Among the community, art seems the sole domain in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|